Tigers hand O’s first loss of season, 7-3

Well, the O’s are beatable (not like anyone thought they weren’t).  Tonight was a poor showing by the pitching staff, the defense, and the offense and when you have bad showings by all 3, you know the team is going to lose.

As I said in my first post, Bergesen, who got the start tonight due to Guthrie’s illness, went 3 2/3 inning giving up 4 runs (2 being unearned) on 80 some pitches.  Rupe replaced him and pitched 3 innings giving up 2 runs, those runs being back to back homers.  Gonzalez came in for only 1 inning and a third and also gave up a run.  The only well pitched inning was the 9th by Kevin Gregg, who gave up 2 hits but no runs.

Gregg’s good inning didn’t matter though.  The damage was already done.  12 hits and 7 runs given up in 8 innings whereas Verlander, the starting pitcher for the Tigers, only gave the O’s 4 hits and 3 runs and pitched 8 great innings of ball with 9 strikeouts (3 of them coming to strike out the side in the 7th.

So, the O’s get their first loss and go to 4-1, which is still a great start.  However, if Bergesen is going to eventually be named the 5th starter in the rotation, he has a lot of work to do.  This, hopefully, was just a bad night for him, but he could not get out of innings.  It seemed like a majority of the hits and walks given up by Bergesen were on 2 outs and as I said in my previous post, the 4 runs he gave up came with 2 outs in the innings.  That is completely unacceptable.  Along with this problem, he struggled to command his pitches and his sinker, his go-to pitch, was not successful all night.

Let’s talk about the defense.  2 errors in the same inning to score 2 runs. That cannot happen.  Their defense has been so tight these past 4 games, but tonight it just looked terrible.  Also, I feel bad for Mark Reynolds who made an awesome catch on a very hard hit line drive that he couldn’t throw to first base to get the out because it got stuck in his glove’s webbing.  That was unfortunate.

As for the offense: again, just a poor showing.  Granted, Verlander is a great pitcher and had a great game tonight.  But, being in the AL East, the offense needs to be able to hit off good pitchers often.  The O’s had 7, yes, 7 1-2-3- out innings.

The game tonight was definitely disappointing to O’s fans, but it’s only one game and hey, on the bright side, the Red Sox are 0-5.